When the teacher called on Dulci Apodaca to come up and take her turn introducing her friend, Waldo did not immediately recognize it as his moment, too. He had been thinking of her, foolishly, as Dulci Q. Together they ran through the questions and answers they’d rehearsed. The teacher led the class and parents in applause and Dulci hugged Waldo around the waist.
At the little outdoor celebration that followed, Don Q’s graceful wife, Zuli, appeared to have already found a rhythm with the other second-grade moms, but Q himself stood off to the side looking uncomfortable. He seemed glad to have Waldo to talk to. “Nobody told me private school meant I gotta come here every damn week. We been at this bitch a month, and this the fourth time I been here. Track and Field Day, Arts and Crafts Day . . . and every time you gotta stand around after, eatin’ cupcakes with these people. Don’t these muthafuckers work?” He looked over at the dozens of his fellow parents, incredulous. Waldo wondered what kind of professional obligations Don Q himself was forgoing this morning. “Last week I had to sit two hours on a damn bleacher, all the second grade did was sing one goddamn song about pollution. Plus, truth be told, I definitely got a problem with these cupcakes.” He took a bite out of his second.
Waldo said, “You got a good kid there.”
“She likes you, for some damn reason.” Don Q wiped some icing from his mouth with a napkin. “I may hit you up again, she wants you for anything else. ’Cause you still owe me.”
“For what?”
“O.C., man.” Waldo could have answered that the information Q had provided was, in the end, only a small element of solving the case, but he let it go.
Besides, he could see the pleasure the dealer was taking in the moment, watching his daughter on the playground, deep in a giggle-inducing handclap game with a redheaded classmate. It was hard to reconcile this loving daddy with the vicious criminal who’d only months ago introduced himself to Waldo by dumping a murder victim in front of his cabin and then having his goon beat Waldo senseless.
But maybe it wasn’t all that complicated. Dulci was how Don Q made sense of his fucked-up life, in the same way Waldo found his rules and his Hundred Things to make sense of his own. So it didn’t matter that Q felt out of place here: his daughter belonged, and for all the complaining, he’d show up for her every time he was asked.
On his way out, Waldo followed the voices of older boys and girls and came upon the Stoddard high school and what looked like the beginning of lunch break. He scanned the outdoor tables and spotted Koy Lem and Dionne Shapiro but not Stevie. Then she slipped her arm through Waldo’s and squeezed his biceps. “Looking for me?”
“I was—but I didn’t think I’d find you.”
“I know. My dad wanted me to stay home at least a week, but it’s, like, so depressing there.”
“How about here? Is it awkward?”
“Why?”
“Well . . . Mr. Ouelette . . . ?”
“God. That was, like, so long ago.” It had been a week and a half.
His last time with her, she’d said that the secret she’d asked him to keep about Conor was a test that he’d failed. But with Stevie, everything was a test: every declaration you could only pass by disbelieving, every seduction you could only pass by resisting. Hanging on his arm, the show of affection—what sort of test was this? But as they stood there together, watching life carry on, tragedy and chaos giving way to the everyday high school business of flirting and cruelty, awkwardness and heartbreak, it occurred to Waldo that he wasn’t even the one being tested right now, that he was only a prop in a new bit of Stevie stagecraft designed for some poor teenage boy trying to act like he wasn’t watching them, tearing himself apart while he tried to figure out how he was supposed to react to his new flame or almost-flame pressing her face into the shoulder of some older man.
Stevie said, “Can I ask you something, Waldo? What’s it like when you get old?” He’d never thought about that word applying but maybe it was time to start. She said, “I hope I never have to be your age.”
“No?”
“All the adults I’ve ever met are, like, total psychos. Every single one.”
Stevie Rose let go of his arm and headed toward a crowded table. Dionne Shapiro squeezed against the girl next to her to open up a space for her bestie. All sorts of things happened, like, so long ago.
And just like that, Waldo found himself untethered from L.A.
Unriddling another case, doing what he did best, was deeply satisfying, but the solitude of his life in the woods was calling to him in a way it hadn’t in weeks. He crossed the campus toward his bike already dreaming of its heavenly, ataractic features: his chickens, his vegetable garden, his long walks and his pond and his floating lounge chair. Dreaming of the quiet. The beautiful, never-ending quiet.
This wasn’t like the end of the Pinch case, which had left him feeling larger, open, full of promise. This one had the opposite effect: it closed him down, reminded him how dark and dysfunctional society was, family by family, county by county. Better to escape it again, and the sooner the better.
There was only one remaining obligation before he was fully free of the world: he needed to let Lorena know how everything had shaken out. He’d do that carefully, without engaging. He didn’t have the stomach for any more tension. He’d wait until tonight, when he was safely back in Idyllwild, and even then he’d do it in writing.
But there was so much to tell. The things he’d figured out about Brenda and Daron Wax alone would be heavy freight for an email, to say nothing of the actual confrontation with Brenda and the fireplace poker and the pillow. Plus she’d want to know about Cuppy’s inventively expletive-laden reaction upon learning that he’d managed to arrest the only Wax who hadn’t murdered anyone. She’d want to know about Brenda’s spectacularly nervy request that Waldo make an introduction to Fontella Davis, the “horrible woman,” as Brenda put it, “who’s always on television getting some even more horrible person acquitted”—a request Waldo granted in exchange for Brenda’s voluntary surrender, along with Daron, to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. And she’d definitely want to know about Waldo’s priceless phone conversation with Fontella Davis on the Waxes’ behalf, in which Davis twisted herself in knots trying to rationalize the highly lucrative representation of the murderer of one of her other clients.
Hell, he decided as he reached his bike, he’d just do it on the phone and do it now, get the conversation out of the way and put Los Angeles completely behind him before he even boarded the Greyhound to Banning.
But as soon as he heard Lorena’s voice, he found himself saying, “You free for lunch?”
Her trip was much shorter—not to mention, by car—yet she still managed to arrive twenty minutes late. It was going to put time pressure on their lunch; he only had two hours before the last bus. Even then he spied her taking a leisurely stroll in the opposite direction, studying a display case full of English toffee, or pretending to. When she finally looked over her shoulder, she knew exactly where Waldo was standing, but now the playfulness and flirtation didn’t delight or beguile him. Now he was looking at a woman who’d killed a man in cold blood, thinking about her sweet tooth.
She sauntered over. They didn’t touch. She said, “Did you eat?”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Go get your rabbit food. I’ll meet you near the oyster bar.”
Waldo had suggested the Farmers Market because he’d been having such success here finding fresh ingredients to bring home to her place, not only first-rate produce but fish and poultry that met even his exacting standards of low-footprint transportation. Now he shopped for his dessert first, perusing the many fruit selections at two different stands before settling on a magnificent Fuji apple. Then he headed for the fine-looking salad bar, which he had often eyed but never had call to patronize, as he and Lorena had never stayed on premises for a meal.
The kiosk, though, hit him with an unanticipated challenge: the only way to assemble a salad, it turned out, was in a hard foam container. What were these people thinking? He asked why they didn’t provide the option of reusable plates, but neither the employees nor the customers waiting behind him had patience for that discussion, let alone one about biodegradability or the sins of the Dow Chemical Company. Worse, he’d taken so much time choosing his apple that Lorena would have already found a table where she’d be waiting for him with her own lunch, and he still had a bus to make. Waldo gave up on the salad. The Fuji that started as dessert had become his entire meal.
He found her where she said she’d be, sitting behind a loaded chili cheeseburger the size of her head, doing her best to drown a huge plate of fries in ketchup. “Where’s your lunch?”
“Wasn’t hungry.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, in a way that made clear she knew better. She edged her fries toward him rhetorically.
You’d think she’d want to talk about what she’d done—share misgivings, ask how he felt about it, something—but there was none of that. She started in on her burger, wholly untroubled. More at this moment than ever, she was a mystery to him.
The big question came floating back, the question of whether one could live a damage-free life while trying to sustain a relationship. He still had no answer. It was harder with a partner, for sure, but it might be that with a different woman it wouldn’t be this much harder. Maybe, though, if the two of them had it all to do over again, if they hadn’t gotten pulled under by Stevie and everything else, if Tesoro had never happened, maybe he could have found a way to let go, at least a little—not of his principles, but of his perpetual disappointment with Lorena for not even valuing them. Maybe he could have tried harder to make peace with her eating what she ate, wearing what she wore, driving what she drove. Maybe he could have convinced himself that no one can know what anyone else really needs, just like no one can really know anyone else’s pain.
Waldo walked her through the denouement of the case and the aftermath with Big Jim Cuppy and Fontella Davis. Lorena devoured the burger while she listened, following each heedless chomp with a careful napkin across her mouth, rapacious with one hand and dainty with the other in fetching combination. Even the way she ate was Lorena and only Lorena. For all of their frustration with each other, for all of the madness of these weeks and the darkness of what she’d done in the end, he’d miss her.
She put down her burger and looked at him. “Are we going to talk about it, or are we just going to go on with our lives and pretend it didn’t happen?”
He sighed and bobbed his head, relieved that she’d finally brought it up.
She said, “I believe a thank-you is in order.”
He was surprised she’d frame it like that, but in a twisted way he could see where that would be what she was expecting. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess it is.”
Lorena held his eye while she wiped her fingers one by one, studying him for something—what? Sufficient gratitude? Finally she said, “So, thank you.”
“For what?” He was befuddled; he assumed she’d been talking about killing Tesoro.
She lowered her voice and said, “For killing Tesoro.”
He leaned back, even more befuddled, and said, “Wait—I thought you did it.”
She cackled. “Me? Why me?”
“Because of that thing you said about us being square, after Santa Ana. I figured you meant this,” meaning his bandaged hand. “I fixed your problem with Don Q, and you did Tesoro because he did this to me, and we were square.”
“That’s crazy. He cut you; he didn’t kill you.”
He said, “So . . . why were you thanking me? You thought I did it?” She nodded. “How would that make us square?”
“Because I saved you from the dog. So you saved me from Tesoro. Square.”
“Oh. Oh.” The notion was so unnerving that he ate one of her greasy fries without realizing it until it landed in his stomach like an unexploded grenade.
She said, “Have as many as you want.”
He gently pushed the plate away.
“So, what,” she said, “it wasn’t you?”
But it was a hell of a coincidence and Waldo didn’t believe in those.
Then, in a flash, he understood the thing Don Q had told him over cupcakes.
What was it Q had said in Laguna when he first told him about Tesoro? That somebody should one-eight-seven him, if they had half a reason. The chance Tesoro might make Waldo miss Dulci’s show-and-tell—could something that small qualify? Then again, it could be that when your life is all about a little girl, you see everything about a Tesoro differently. Could be you only need a quarter of a reason, or even less.
He’d spell all that out for Lorena later. Right now she was saying, “I do have to give you props for Stevie. It sucks about her mom, but she’d have been up shit creek if you hadn’t been in her corner.”
“Thanks for that.”
She offered her fries again. He demurred and bit into his apple.
They ate together without talking. He thought about all the fucked-up relationships they’d been around for the last two weeks, and the fucked-up women. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be with anyone like any of them, under any circumstance—a Paula, a Brenda, even a grown-up Stevie—and tried to imagine how it would be for them, trying to be with him. Every variant was unthinkable, really. Maybe he wasn’t made to be with anyone, not anymore. Well, at least he had the right cabin for it.
Lorena polished off the last of the burger. She took a fistful of fresh napkins—Lord Almighty, the woman wasted a shitload of them—and gave every inch of her face a good wipe. When she took the napkins away, she was chuckling.
Waldo said, “What?”
“I thought you killed a man for me, and you thought I killed him for you.”
He chuckled, too. “Yeah.”
She rested her chin on a palm. “Kinda romantic, Waldo, if you think about it.”
They held each other’s gaze for a long, sweet time.
She twinkled and said, “Too bad the sex wasn’t any good.”
Even when she was looking at the damn toffees she’d known exactly where this was going to end up. Fucking Lorena.
His woods could wait.